POV: Evelyne / Alaric
EVELYNE
The summons had come on the second morning at the manor, and she had been on the road by noon. The handwriting was his soft one. The line at the close said come to the estate before midnight.
By the third hour out, the word she had not let form for two weeks formed.
Pregnant.
She set her hand under the cloak on her belly and held it there. The cold sat lower than her palm could reach now, and to the right of where her fingers spread. Two blackouts in the last week. Her wrists had gone thin in a way no fitter had called wrong yet but the next one would. The dress at the last fitting had sat strangely.
She had been telling herself a string of small stories about it, and the stories had stopped working on this road.
She thought about the midwife at the village past her own gate, a discreet one, and she would stop there on the trip back. She would not tell Alaric anything until she had been told something certain. He had enough sitting on him in the house arrest, and she would not bring him a possible child if a midwife could turn it into nothing instead.
She had a plan for the visit. She would let him have her quiet, and have the bed, and sleep beside him, and leave at first light, and stop at the village before she reached the manor.
The carriage took the last rise above Vessant.
The gate stood open and the wing steward came out under the porch lamp, his face a grey she did not remember. He bowed too long. A girl she had never seen took the cloak from her hands and did not meet her eyes, and two guards she did not know stood at the inner arch. The senior steward who had held the door for years was not there.
"Where is the old man?"
"Laid up in his bed, my lady. The fever caught him in the second week."
The fever in twelve days, and she had been gone twelve days.
She walked the inner hall. The lamps were lit low and the corridors smelled of something sour she could not name. A footman she had known for years passed her with a tray, hands shaking against the silver, and did not bow. In the dining wing the cook stood at the open kitchen door speaking with a girl who had not been in this household at the last visit, and both their faces were the colour of paper left in a window.
The dread came up under her sternum and stayed there. This was the place she had been visiting for years. The place she had charmed for years. It would be the house arrest, she told herself. The imperial guards at the gates. Money pulled tight. A house under that kind of strain showed it first in the staff.
She did not believe herself.
He was in the small dining room. He came to his feet when she walked in.
Of every face in the building, his was the only one that did not look unwell.
His skin had a colour she had not seen on him in months. He stood with his weight even on both feet, where for the last year he had favoured the left when he was tired. His shirt was open at the throat and the bone there sat clean under the skin. His eyes followed her across the threshold and did not drift once.
"You came," he said.
He crossed to her and took her face in both hands and kissed her on the mouth before she had set down her gloves. She had been kissed by him a thousand times. None of them had been this, perhaps not even the first. His mouth stayed on hers a count longer than she expected, and his thumb passed below her ear, and then he leaned away and met her eyes.
He looked at her.
Her heart did the small skip it did when he looked at her, and the skip was bigger this time.
She set the gloves on the side table with hands that wanted to shake.
"You look well, better than you did when I left."
"I have been sleeping."
"All this." She gestured at the corridor behind her, where the staff were grey and the hush did not match a quiet evening. "I came in and I thought."
"It is the constraint." His hand stayed on her hip. "The fever is going through the household, we have replaced what we had to, and it will pass."
His hand on her hip was warm. The cold under her own hand on her belly under the cloak did not warm in answer to it, but the heat of him was a thing she could press her body against, and she did.
"And Thomas, where is he?" she said into his shoulder.
"Thomas is away."
"He does not leave without saying."
"A matter of his own, we will speak of it later, not tonight." His hand at her hip pressed once.
He turned her toward the dining room before she could ask a third time.
ALARIC
She walked in carrying his next body.
On the night he took Alaric over at the vault, he had planted it in her. Every visit since, the body he wore had fed it more. She did not know yet, but her hand kept returning to her belly under the cloak. She suspected a child.
She did not know it was already listening.
Tonight's feeding had to put it past the point a midwife could remove it. After tonight, no herb, no knife, no village woman with clean hands and old knowledge would be able to take it from her.
When it was born, he would leave Alaric behind.
And Alaric would die.
The house arrest irritated him. He could not leave the rooms. The staff in the rooms had been dying because he was feeding off them too. He had killed too many at the start and made the household notice. He killed them slower now, and told her there was a fever going through.
He put his hand on her hip and felt her press into him. Alaric's body still wanted her without being told.
EVELYNE
He had ordered her favourites, and the wine was the one she had always asked him to keep on hand for her. He had pulled one for tonight. He poured for her first and did not lift his own cup.
She drank, and she ate, and he watched her eat with the attention she had wanted on her for years.
"If the arrest were lifted," he said, halfway through the second course, "I would have you here."
"Here." She did not say anything else.
"At the estate, permanently, not for visits."
It was a sentence she had wanted from him for years. She set her fork down and her cheeks went hot, and she had her three-count behind her teeth and she used it.
"You would weather the gossip."
"I would not have to weather it, because the arrest would be lifted because the matter would be settled, and I would settle it. I would have you in this house."
She did not trust the colour in her own face. She lifted her cup to give her hand something to do, and he reached across the table and took her wrist before her cup got there. He pulled her toward him, and her chair scraped, and her hip hit the table edge, and he was standing.
"Alaric, there are staff." She laughed, and the laugh was breathy.
"Send them out."
"You send them out."
"They are gone." His chest was at her shoulder and the wine in her cup had to be set down before he had her against him. "Look."
The footman had gone, the girl who had served the second course had gone, and the door to the kitchen passage was shut.
He had her face in one hand and his mouth on her neck before she had drawn breath to ask when he had done it.
"Alaric."
"Bedroom," he said into her skin, "or here, you choose."
He had not given her a choice like this before. He was giving her one now and she could feel him hard against her hip. She pushed at his chest with the heel of her hand and got laughter back instead of distance, and her own laugh came up under it, and her body had stopped pretending it had not been waiting for him.
"Bedroom," she said. "There are still staff in this house and they have ears."
He took her hand and walked her out of the dining room without asking again.
ALARIC / EVELYNE
He had her on the bed before the lamp by the door was lit. He set the book he had not been reading aside without looking at it, took her wrist, walked her to the mattress in three strides, and laid her down with a gentleness she had not expected from him in any hour of any visit. Then the gentleness ended.
He put his mouth on her throat and his hand under her shift and dragged the fabric up over her hips. He was inside her with the first stroke. She heard the sound she made and did not recognize it. Her cunt was already wet for him, and her thighs gripped his hips because they remembered the angle.
"You're mine," he said into her ear. It was not a question. He was telling her.
"Yours."
He pushed deep and his hand at her wrist tightened. "Mine."
"Yours."
He turned her over and brought her hips back to his and was inside her again before she had drawn breath. He fucked her hard and unbroken, the way this version of him fucked her now, and she pressed her face down into the sheets because she did not want the household to hear what he made her sound like.
His hand went flat on her belly under the weight of him, low, palm cupping the place where she had been keeping her own hand under the cloak for two weeks.
"This body is mine."
She came around his cock with her teeth in the pillow and his cold palm pressing the child she had not been letting herself name. By the second round, her body had stopped obeying anything but him. By the third, her cunt was sore beyond what soreness should be and her wrists were braced against the headboard.
The cold in his spine pulsed in step with him. Behind the eyes the thing was using, Alaric counted the pour. The cold went out of his spine through his cock and into her and settled below her navel where the new body was taking what he was giving it.
She had come the day's road for the feeding, and she did not know.
When he finished, he pulled out and rolled onto his back, one arm across his eyes.
"Sleep," he said.
She was not ready to sleep. Her body was loose and her mouth wanted his. She turned onto her side and pressed against his ribs.
He did something he had never done with her in any bed.
He slid down her body, set his cheek against her belly low where his palm had been, and closed his eyes. He held his ear there to listen, the same posture a man uses to listen for a heart in a chest.
She put her hand in his hair.
It was the most tender thing he had ever done with her in a bed. Her eyes filled. She had wanted him to do something like this since the first night he had ever had her, and she was getting it tonight, and she did not let herself ask why.
Out of her sight, the thing wearing him smiled against her skin.
ALARIC
He was screaming.
He had been screaming since the bedroom door shut. He had been screaming since his hand cupped her belly in the dining room and felt what was sitting under it, since he had heard his own voice tell her he would have her at the estate permanently, since she had said yours and given away the last line she had meant to keep.
He was screaming and no part of his body was listening.
His ear was on her belly and the thing was using it to listen for the heart inside her, and he could feel the small drum of what was in her against the side of his face.
He tried to lift his head. The head did not lift. He went for the eyes next and the eyes stayed closed. The cheek would not come off her belly, and the hand in his hair was hers, gentle, holding him in place because she thought he was being gentle with her.
He drove every part of himself at the muscle of his right hand. The hand was on the sheet beside her thigh, slack, where the thing had let it sit.
The thumb twitched.
It twitched once. The size of it would not have shown on a candle's shadow. He had no warning before it and no leverage after it, and the thing on his spine pulled the hand back smooth before she could turn her head down to look.
She did not look down.
She put her other hand on his shoulder and stroked the place where his neck met it, and her breathing slowed, and she said something soft above him that he could not make out because the thing had taken hearing along with the rest.
He drove again and nothing came of it. He drove again and the thumb did not move.
He stayed with his cheek on her belly while she fell asleep, listening to what was inside her with an ear that was not his, and his hand stayed where the thing had put it, and the thumb did not twitch a second time before her breathing softened above him.
He had moved it once.
He started counting from there.